Correspond in Chinook: how to say ‘sandwiches and clam chowder’

This souvenir clambake plate may have been given out at the event mentioned below. Nice swag! (Image credit: WorthPoint)

Pioneer Thomas Prosch of Seattle adds to a string of Chinuk Wawa-rich appearances in this space…

Check out how the Seattle P-I editor takes a swipe at J.A. Kuhn’s newfangled Chinook Jargon spelling (which follows what was by then an effective standard used in the most popular CJ dictionaries), contrasting it with Prosch’s idiosyncratic and therefore more genuine way of writing!

As usual, I’ll let you read through the original article, then, after it, I’ll get into the guts of its Chinook.

(Hint — we’re fortunate today to have an English translation provided by one of the pioneer Settlers involved. I think it’s sort of a Rosetta Stone that shows us how those people thought about their Jargon and some of their unique idioms.)

CORRESPOND IN CHINOOK.

Thomas W. Prosch, the well-known Seattle pioneer, received a letter yesterday that took his memory back to the early days on Puget Sound. It was an invitation written in Chinook, from [Judge] J.A. Kuhn, of Port Townsend, and requested Mr. Prosch’s presence at a potlatch to be given there June 9. The letter is as follows:

Instead of attaching his signature, Mr. Kuhn pasted his photograph at the bottom of the letter. A free translation is as follows:

“How are you, Tom? I want to talk to you. I will make a big party for you and our friends, at the old garrison here June 9. There will be lots of clams, fun, hilarity, sandwiches, plenty of coffee, a little rum and whisky. We want you to come and bring all your family.”

Mr. Prosch, not to be outdone, yesterday penned the following letter, the spelling in which it will be noticed has in some places a more ancient appearance than the invitation’s:

“Dear Sir: I received your letter today. I am much obliged to you, and am anxious to go on June 9. I feel very kindly toward you and all Port Townsend people. Forty-three years ago, I went to Port Townsend, and knew you and all the old settlers well. I will come with Fowler, Briggs, Pettygrove, Hastings, Swan, Jones.

náyka tíki wáwa máyka.[1] This sentence exactly matches the standard letter-beginning greeting found in the 1890s Kamloops, BC Chinuk Pipa community of usage. I feel confident that in both cases it reflects typical habits of speaking in person, just as virtually everything in authentic documented Chinook Jargon does. This was almost exclusively a spoken, not written, language.

háyás pátlach [2] The use of “potlatch” as a noun is almost exclusively the domain of Settlers bilingual in English.

íləp [4] lákit sánti I’m mighty sure about my translation here (‘after four weeks’). But íləp means ‘before’! This feels like a slip of the tongue, as it were, by Kuhn. I figure he was reaching for kimt’á ‘after’, which is frequently used in this time-referring way. It’s worth comparing Prosch’s seeming difficulty with ‘before; ago’ in his response below…Compare note 9.

háyú kláms [5] ‘Clams’, from English, is a Chinuk Wawa word. It always occurs with the final “S” in my experience, so I’m not analyzing that as an added-on plural suffix, in this case. Cultural note: háyú kláms ‘lots of clams’ was pretty much a Puget Sound catchphrase, thanks to the dirty Jargon folk song “Seattle Illahee“.

tíntin [6] The translation provided, ‘hilarity’, doesn’t quite do it for me. This word, literally ‘bell’, also meant ‘music’, which in the context seems probable — gatherings of PNW oldtimers always featured singalongs, often in Chinook Jargon.

tənəs-saplél-íkta-s [7] Here we have a new discovery. It looks like we can trust the translator that this phrase (literally ‘little-bread-things’) meant ‘sandwiches’. A nice discovery of a new Jargon word! Mind you, because we didn’t know this term before now, at Grand Ronde they’ve innovated a nice way to name that food: kátsaq-kʰapa-saplél mə́kʰmək (‘middle-of-bread food’).

łúsh chə́qw [8] Literally ‘good/healthy water’, this phrase would’ve escaped our notice if it hadn’t been for the helpful translator. The best way to understand it is probably as ‘soft drinks’ (non-alcoholic ones) as opposed to hard drinks like lám. ‘Coffee’ is a bit of a euphemism here (because there was already a universally known word for that, kʰófi / kʰópi)…talking very frankly about booze wasn’t very polite in Settler society, was it?

t’łúnas, pi [9] tənəs-lám Here we have a punctuation problem. I’m reading the sentence as ‘…soft drinks will be there, I guess, and some alcohol.’ If we stuck closer to the semi-colon’ed published version, it’d look like ‘…soft drinks will be there. Maybe and alcohol.’ Which (maybe and…) was what Kuhn really wrote. Maybe and…he might have been reaching for wə́x̣t ‘also’, but came up with pi ‘and’? Compare note 4.

íxt úskan mə́kʰmək [11] óna*-súp Because íxt in the best Jargon usage signfies ‘a particular one’, this is slightly clunky, but the idea could well have been ‘one each’. (That’s íxt-íxt in the most fluent usage.) Also giving pause is úskan mə́kʰmək, which we’d automatically take as ‘a bowl of food’ in any other context. It becomes evident that Kuhn has left out a word to indicate ‘for (the purpose of)’; I’d normally expect úskan kʰupa mə́kʰmək, or especially at Grand Ronde, úskan (s)pus mə́kʰmək.

óna*-súp [12] Congratulations, another newly discovered word! ‘Clam chowder’ is literally ‘clam-soup’, here using another and more bookish word for ‘clams’, óna. I bet you a dollar, though, that folks actually said klams-sup.

And second, Prosch’s response:

< Tsehalalitch, May 24. >dᶻidᶻəlal’ič [12], May 24‘Seattle, May 24.’
“Seattle, May 24.”

dᶻidᶻəlal’ič [12] is the local dxʷləšúcid (Lushootseed Salish) name for the location of Seattle. Prosch, like other earlybirds of that city, is mixing whatever Lushootseed words he knows in with his Chinuk Wawa.

[Ø] [13] is the “null” (non-pronounced) preposition that’s typical as a variant of kʰupa in fluent and old-school Jargon speech.

When you compare what I’ve shown here with the published translations, you’ll find that the newspaper made a few blunders, but they’re fairly minor. The P-I got the essence of the exchanged messages. Both of them look like authentic early-pioneer Jargon…as remembered decades afterwards!